Wednesday, May 20, 2009

If it's Tuesday ...

Fox seems to have picked up its game a bit since our last visit. The lurid junior-high bits are almost gone, and the reporter (named) has gone out and found some "taxpayer watchdogs" (or "government watchdogs," he doesn't seem quite sure which) to "cry foul" on cue. Well, actually, he's found one watchdog; that's the Fox Plural there, creating a movement from a single source. And. to be fair, we stick fairly close to an actual public policy issue: should we spend tax money on Them Foreigners?

Oddly, Fox more or less gives that point away:

While some active NIH projects -- such as studies of suicide patterns among young men and women in China -- have a clearer relevance for communities living in the U.S., the utility of this study for U.S. citizens is not as clear-cut.

Well, that'll save a few hundred thousand right there. We can outsource all that messy peer review to Fox News.

The abstract indicates that it is intended to create prevention models specifically tailored to the "sociocultural factors specific to female and kathoey sex workers" in Thailand.

Yes. And it concludes: "Internationally, studies are needed on how to translate and adapt interventions that have proven to be effective in the U.S. to other communities and international settings, and to learn from other conditions and cultures to inform our understanding of the causes, consequences, and differences in HIV-related risks, morbidity, and mortality in diverse populations." It'd be nice if the researchers themselves took a whack at explaining the relevance, but they don't seem to have returned Fox's phone calls. Can't say I'm shocked at that.

I expect we'll see a few more of these, but they might just fade away as Fox realizes that they aren't really that interesting.

I realize there's no paper being used, so there's little or no expense, but since when does a news outlet or any sort run the same story multiple times? There's plenty of Democrat Socialist Party fodder for them to chew on.

Well, y'know, it's not really the _same_ story. It's more like the playoffs: First day you can use "You're in trouble now," second day "you're really in trouble now," third day "HO HO HO freedom-loving fools," and so on.

There's a lot of stuff floating around the NIH; they could keep this up for a while, if they've a mind to.